| Authors Introduction
By Gil Wilson Welcome to Dr. Bronson’s History of the City of St. Augustine. I would like to encourage all the readers of Dr. Bronson’s History to step into the web and do something that you can’t do with a book ---- correspond with the writer. I enjoy comments (and additions!) that readers have made over the years. I love the web--- where else could you receive comments from around the world and find relatives, researchers, genealogists and others who are interested in the history of St. Augustine. Contact me at glwilson_us@yahoo.com. These pages were started around 2002. I was attempting to start a walking tour business in St. Augustine and these were part of the web pages that I used to set up my tour business. The page was a hit but the tours were not. Not many people wanted a great history tour when they could walk around at night and receive a fake ghost tour. I was averaging two to three people a day compared to the thousands of people per day taking ghost tours. Oh well….but I liked the exercise and being out of doors after being confined to offices at Humana Health insurance for a decade. The history page was originally one page long….but it grew and grew until I discovered that you could not have all the information in the world on one page. At that point I began dividing the pages into eras. Next due to my love of classics I started dating everything from the founding of the city (as in ancient Rome). I spend a lot of time reading 19th century history texts so the format with the bold titles for paragraphs or subsections resulted from that association (and I wish modern texts would appropriate the same format since it makes it much easier to read and find information.) Finally somewhere in the process I started moving all the documentation that I accumulated over a decade as coeditor of the St. Augustine Genealogy Journal to the site. Lots of the links that underlie this web site go to information and stories that were used in the journal. This history has several sources besides the genealogy journal. Because I started this web site as an introduction for visitors to come to my walking tours I was never concerned with citing sources (which would be a real pain for the main pages anyway) and hey….sorry but it’s my web site. I don’t need no stinking footnotes. If you’re a researcher, go do some real work (at least I’ve told you what’s there). If you’re a student you can site the website itself. If you want to see how many footnotes I can do go to the Prince Georges Public Library in Maryland and see my History of Slavery in Prince Georges County or the Economic Effects of the Freedmen’s Bureau Education Programs on Former Slaves in Prince George’s County. Ugh no more footnotes! However, the original documents in the web site come from the St. Augustine Historical Society, National Archives, Library of Congress, New York Public Library, University of Florida at Gainesville, Florida Library and Archives, Florida Memorial College, Carlisle (U.S. Army War College), Columbia University, Yale University and the Amsted Research Library in New Orleans. For printed secondary sources I have over 6 feet of books on St. Augustine (and still growing). Perhaps some day I’ll list them all. The website contains hundreds of links to other Web sites of original source documents. This will be increasing as time permits. In the 1990s I was a participant in or at least a very impassioned observer of St. Augustine so I have never created a page for that time period. Some time maybe but I have a lot of bias for that period especially with the fall of the Democratic party, the opening and shutting of the doors on elected African-American officials (Coach Floyd was the best elected official St. Johns County ever had) and the election of the four horsemen of the apocalypse to the County Commission. It will be a while before the 1990s appear. I live in New Orleans now. Moved here in time for Katrina. House flooded. Trees fell all over the lot but everything was fine for the most part of my historical records. I'm the coowner of a child care center, but my heart apparently will always be with St. Augustine history. Gil Wilson is a graduate of Marshall University BA in Political Science minors in English and Sociology 1973, Wesley Theological Seminary M Divinity 1976, and Johns Hopkins University 1991 Master of Science (Economic Education). Additional couse work was also completed at the University of Maryland, University of North Florida, Prince Georges Community College, St. Johns River Community College, and Northern Virginia Community College. Mr Wilson has held a variety of career positions including a stint as an intern on Capitol Hill, a United Methodist Pastor, an apartment complex owner, a public school teacher, Project Manager, Training Manager, a UCC minister, Economics adjunct professor at Florida Community College and a teacher in New Orleans Public Schools. Major Rewrite Even as I add more and more pages about a variety of subjects I'm thinking about a major rewrite. I am absolutely embarassed to look back and see how I have not understood native Americans in this creation. St. Augustine exists on top of the genocide and destruction of the native peoples of Florida. The Castillo is perhaps the largest monument to Native Americans in America being built by a combination of Native peoples, blacks, Mexicans (still native peoples) and criminal slave labor. At best the Spanish "supervised" the construction. This destruction of native peoples continues throughout the First Spanish period with the British and 2nd Spanish periods being only somewhat better. The American period is especially poor with three events: the Seminole Wars,and the captivity of the Plains Indians and the Apachie nation. As much as I admire Sarah Mathers for the contributions she made to the second half of the 1800s she was one of the people responsible for the "Americanizing" of native peoples by stripping them of their identity, culture and language. Somehow this major thread will need to be woven into the story and I apologize to any native peoples I have offended ---- although it probably looks like just another history. The story of St. Augustine deserves better than "another history." St. Augustine is a multicultural history to the nation second only to New Orleans my new adopted home. Gil www.fellowschildrensacademy.com |